With the advent of databases holding information about customer's, client's, etc. (hereinafter referred to as customer) preferences, purchases, past actions, and the like, it has become possible to generate targeted communications that are targeted specifically to a particular customer based upon the data held in the database. Such databases may be exemplified by so-called supermarket loyalty schemes. However, the skilled person will appreciate that such schemes are only one such example.
Such targeted communications may be thought of as more high value than communications that are sent en masse to a plurality of customers since they are targeted to a particular customer and are therefore perhaps more likely to be well received. However, in order that a targeted communication is well received it must be laid out correctly.
It will be appreciated that databases may comprise many thousands (and even tens or hundreds of thousands) of customers. It would be impossible to check, manually, that targeted communications sent to such a number of people conform to accepted presentation rules within reasonable time scales. As such the process should be advantageously performed automatically.
Readers of the communications are exposed to a large number of professionally published materials and consequently, have strong expectations of high quality documents. Thus, readers generally have an expectation that any communications they receive will be of a high quality.
Prior solutions are based on stochastic searches in unrestricted spaces. The objectives of these prior solutions tended to be the minimisation of wasted (i.e. empty) space and/or the elimination of overlaps between different objects. Such prior art does not address some of the concerns that arise in publishing; empty space is a rest area for the eyes of a reader and publications generally have an amount of such empty space. A typical holiday brochure may have roughly 20% empty space. The distribution of such empty space and its pattern is perhaps more relevant than the amount of such space.
Additional considerations arise if the targeted communication is a printed page such as a catalogue, pamphlet, letter, or the like. Unlike electronic documents such as web pages, emails, etc., a printed page has hard boundaries (i.e. no scrollbars) and for targeted communications continuation on the next page may generally be avoided.